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Sherborne is a market town in northwest Dorset, England. It is sited on the River Yeo, on the edge of the Blackmore Vale, 6 miles (9.7 km) east of Yeovil. The A30 road, which connects London to Penzance, runs through the town. In the 2011 census the population of Sherborne parish was 9,523. 28.7% of the population is aged 65 or older.
Sherborne's historic buildings include Sherborne Abbey, its manor house, independent schools, and two castles: the ruins of a 12th-century fortified palace and the 16th-century mansion known as Sherborne Castle built by Sir Walter Raleigh. Much of the old town, including the abbey and many medieval and Georgian buildings, is built from distinctive ochre-coloured ham stone.
The town is served by Sherborne railway station.
The town was named scir burne by the Saxon inhabitants, a name meaning "clear stream", after a brook that runs through the centre of the town, and is referred to as such in the Domesday Book.
In 705 the diocese of Wessex was split between Sherborne and Winchester, and King Ine founded an abbey for St Aldhelm, the first Bishop of Sherborne, which covered, Dorset, Somerset, and Devon. King Alfred the Great's elder brothers, King Æthelbald and King Æthelberht, are buried in the abbey. The large Sherborne diocese lasted until about 909 when it was further sub-divided into three sees, with Sherborne covering Dorset. In 933, King Æthelstan granted land at Sherborne to the nuns of Shaftesbury Abbey under the condition that they would recite the Psalter once a year on All Saints' day and say prayers for the king. The bishop's seat was moved to Old Sarum in 1075 and the church at Sherborne became a Benedictine monastery. In 1437 the Abbey was damaged by fire after tensions between the town and the monastery came to a head, but much of the Norman structure stands today. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, in 1539 the vacated monastery building was bought by Sir John Horsey and became the parish church. Sherborne was the centre of a hundred of the same name for many centuries.
In the 12th century Roger de Caen, Bishop of Salisbury and Chancellor of England, built a fortified palace in Sherborne. During the English Civil War, the palace was destroyed in 1645 by General Fairfax. Its ruins are at present owned by English Heritage.
In 1594 Sir Walter Raleigh built an Elizabethan mansion in the grounds of the old palace, today known as Sherborne Castle - a 16th-century Tudor mansion southeast of Sherborne, within the parish of Castleton. It stands in a 1,200-acre (490 ha) park which formed a small part of the 15,000-acre Digby estate. The castle was built as the fortified palace of Roger de Caen, Bishop of Salisbury and Chancellor of England, and still belonged to the church in the late 16th century. In the early 1140s, the castle was captured by Robert Earl of Gloucester during the Anarchy, when it was considered, "the master-key of the whole kingdom".
After passing through Sherborne on the way to Plymouth, Sir Walter Raleigh fell in love with the castle, and Queen Elizabeth relinquished the estate, leasing it to Raleigh in 1592. Rather than refurbish the old castle, Raleigh decided to construct a new lodging for temporary visits, in the compact form for secondary habitations of the nobility and gentry, often architecturally sophisticated, that was known as a lodge. The new house, Sherborne Lodge, was a four-storey, rectangular building completed in 1594. The antiquary John Aubrey remembered it as "a delicate Lodge in the park, of Brick, not big, but very convenient for its bignes, a place to retire from the Court in summer time, and to contemplate, etc." It had four polygonal corner turrets with angled masonry as if they were to serve for military defence, which Nicholas Cooper suggests "may be an obeisance to the old building". Its most progressive feature for its date was the entrance, disguised in one of the corner towers so as not to spoil the apparent symmetry of the facade, which was centred on a rectangular forecourt. The entrance vestibule also contained a winder stairwell and gave directly on the hall.
Sherborne became home to Yorkshireman Captain Christopher Levett, who came to the West Country as His Majesty's Woodward of Somersetshire, and who remained in Sherborne when he turned to a career as a naval captain and early explorer of New England.
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